Those of you who fled to Montreal to avoid the excessive hype surrounding the release of my second book are probably outraged by the O. Henry twist of discovering the French edition of my FIRST book crowding out Jules Verne in all the Canadian bookstores. Well, serves you right.

The French edition is a beauty – technically a livre, and not a book: livres are taller with a slight bevel to the page corners – and wonderfully translated by Nathalie Bru, who, the title page wants you to know, was working from a manuscript in United States English, rather than, say, British English, which, I’ll be the first to admit, probably made the entire enterprise much more of a challenge. (Whether or not she translated the book into Canadian French, those of you in self-imposed exile will have to tell me.)

Nathalie Bru, translator extraordinaire.

The cover design is by Jean-Francois Martin. It says on his website that doing the cover helped him prepare for the World Typo Championship, which this year will be held in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwll-llantysiliogogogoch, Whales. (This is my own somewhat free translation of"Jean-François Martin se prépare pour le championnat du monde de typo avec une nouvelle couverture pour un roman des éditions Les Grands Personnes écrit par Henry Clark et intitulé Ce qu'on a trouvé dans le canapé puis comment on a sauvé le monde." It's possible Llanfairpwllgwyngyll-gogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch wasn't really mentioned.) (And I know it's Wails and not Whales; I was just attempting a little "typo" humor.)

Here's the back cover. I'm pretty sure the bit about me translates as "Henry Clark spends an awful lot of time on his sofa." (It's as if the French can see into my living room!)

And here's a map of the Paris Metro, with the names of the stations replaced with the titles of this spring's more interesting Young Adult books. (Clicking it will make it full size, but be prepared to jump back.) My book's the third stop on the red "Inclassable" line, making it an easy walk to the Louvre and the Apple store. (I'm hoping Inclassable means "unclassifiable," rather than "not classy.")

The book was actually printed in Spain, so, in future, I intend telling people I had both a French edition and a Spanish edition. This is one of the few benefits of outsourcing.

And - - I've just been informed the French edition has sold over trois copies! If I recall correctly from high school, trois is French for million! Incroyable!

Above is Terry and Eric Fan’s illustration for Chapter 17 of The Book that Proves Time Travel Happens. As you can tell, it’s based on one of the proposed designs for the Trylon and the Perisphere, the iconic central pavilion of the 1939 World’s Fair, before the design was chucked after a survey revealed fair visitors didn’t want to walk around inside a giant mouse.

As I post this, it's only one week until Time Travel's publication, so I figure we should show off more examples of the artwork, which, in the book, will be reproduced the size of a postage stamp because the author overran his 75,000 word limit and it was either that or use4 point type and include a magnifying glass so it's only fair the art be given a larger showing somewhere. Below is the Fan brothers' rendering of Shofranka Camlo's charm bracelet, complete - sometimes - with the mysterious Vanishing Key.

And then there's this:

One of the more quiet, introspective moments from the book, an oasis of calm amid the antic action in the surrounding story, a serene break in which the reader can catch his or her breath after a few scenes that are, quite frankly, a little over the top.